Samsung shines the spotlight on the new 8-core Galaxy S 4

Call from global LTE frequencies, scroll by tilting.

Samsung unveiled the Galaxy S 4, the next in its line of popular Galaxy series Android handsets, at a theatrical event this evening at Radio City Music Hall in New York City.

The Android handset looks similar to its predecessor, right down to the rounded edges, curved body, and plastic chassis, not to mention that signature Home button. It is 136mm long, 69mm wide, 7.9mm thin, and it weighs 130 grams—taller, thinner, and lighter than the Galaxy S III. It comes with a 5-inch AMOLED display with a 1080p resolution. All of this is powered up by a 2,600 mAh battery.

The flagship model's SOC will be an eight-core Samsung Exynos 5, which uses ARM's big.LITTLE technology to meld together four fast CPU cores with four slower but more power-efficient cores and seamlessly switches between them. However, not all markets will get the Exynos-equipped phone. The alternate SOC choice is a 1.9GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro.

The Galaxy S 4 runs Android 4.2 Jelly Bean and has 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage with an added expansion slot. It features Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.0, and infrared LED, which can control your television with the WatchOn app. Depending on the market, the Galaxy S 4 will have wireless charging capabilities.

The new Android handset comes with a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera and a 2MP front-facing camera with their own new features. Users can now attach audio to photos, adding "another dimension of detail to the visual memory to be created." The Galaxy S 4 also features a dual-camera view that allows users to take photos with both the front- and rear-facing cameras at the same time. The camera has an "eraser," which lets you erase people (like photo-bombers) out of photos.

Samsung's proprietary Touchwiz interface is also getting a bit of a boost. With Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean, Samsung will tack on features like the Daydream screensaver functionality and lock screen widgets. The Galaxy S 4 will include a significant upgrade to its S-Voice digital assistant functionality, like S Voice Drive, which will feature bigger font sizes and more text-to-speech, as well as the ability to respond to a message hands-free. Samsung has also introduced S Translator, which translates messages in nine languages, including French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Samsung promises that the phone will let us live "without boundaries." Users will be able to perform "Air Gestures" by hovering their fingers above the handset for a Galaxy Note II S-pen-like effect. There is an "Air View" function that lets users hover a finger over things like a date to see additional information—yet another feature borrowed from the Note. The handset will be able to connect to the Samsung's HomeSync, a personal cloud device with 1TB of space; it can stream to any smartphone, TV, tablet, or computer. That content can be mirrored on the Galaxy S 4.

Before its debut, the new handset was rumored to include an eye-tracking technology called Smart Scroll, which uses the front-facing camera to follow along as the user's eyes moves through content on the screen. The feature was removed or altered before launch and now uses a tilting method to help with this scrolling functionality. It will rely on facial recognition and the physical tilt of the device to function. The Galaxy S 4 will also include Smart Pause, which pauses video if it recognizes that the user is no longer watching what is currently playing on screen.

For the business-centric, the Galaxy S 4 features "KNOX," a mobile device management technology that lets you keep work and play separate, like BlackBerry Balance. And like BlackBerry's BES 10, companies can manage different programs and apps on the "business" side of the phone without reaching into a user's personal data.

Finally, Samsung introduced S Health, which acts as a personal pedometer and fitness coach of sorts. The app features temperature and humidity sensors to detect surroundings during a workout session, and users can input how much they eat and sleep. In addition, a companion wrist band called the S Band will track information, much like the Fitbit.

The Samsung Galaxy S 4 will be available in the second quarter of this year, and the company plans to launch it to over 357 global mobile operators. It will support up to six global LTE networks and frequencies ("Hexa band" support"), depending on the market.

Sure, but one problem I've had with all the focus on cores is that they don't really help with performance very much. It seems to me that one of the biggest bottlenecks in Android's performance that is rarely discussed is the speed of the flash memory. It's slow as balls on most phones and this is actually the cause of most lag when it comes to opening and switching between apps. Fix this and Android phones would fly.

One of the kernel developers for the Nexus 7 now releases his kernel with a max of 2 cores active by default to maximise battery life. I've been running his kernel with the 2-core setting for over a month now with no noticeable impact on performance (though I don't run games very often). I'd agree that the flash controller is the biggest bottleneck for performance.

Or it could be the issues with ARM and memory bandwidth. Remember, flash storage is long-term and getting it into memory may take time, but once the data is in memory, it should be relatively fast. However, due to ARM having low memory bandwidth between RAM and the CPU caches, you have to 1) do a lot more swapping between cache and RAM and 2) wait longer because the transfer is slower. The reason the 2-core kernel works just as fine is because each core doesn't have to wait as long for data to be moved into the CPU caches because there are fewer cores needing data.

I do to. But remember the GS4 has a removable battery and sd-card slot.

Most high end cell phone users have don't use them/have learned to get by without them.

I know some people are heavy users of them...but really, it's a technology that will be gone from most cell phones several iterations from now.

That sounds like a *fact* when it's just an opinion. Still, if you qualify with "several iterations", your *opinion* may be valid. I know a lot of people who don't use Apple because they need removable batteries and can swap out when needed.

Perhaps when phones have 32GB internal memory and batteries that last for a solid 48 hours, you won't have a call for these features. That's just my opinion.

EDIT: But then again, its WONDERFUL to be able to save stuff on your SD card and just move it to a new Android phone and have it just work to import password manager data, databases, music, pictures, video, etc.

I do love my Android Nexus device but id have to say i wasn't impressed, felt more like a bunch of gimmicks. 1080p screens are becoming standard that the only thing that caught my attention was the AMOLED screen. That's only because i like the color reproduction and inky blacks.

Pthreads aren't harder here then anywhere else. The Java-based Dalvik parts are multithread-enabled too of course with a bit of different techniques, like worker threads and asynctasks. Dalvik itselfs spans new threads for every app of course. Could probably be a lot better on the VM-side. But games and so on use Pthreads any way. Most larger apps use the NDK.

It honestly doesn't matter how multithreaded Android is, if the Dalvik virtual machine can't take advantage of multiple cores. The vast, vast majority of Android apps are running on Dalvik.

In Android 4, one of the bulleted new features was limited support for a second core. (They called out running garbage collection from the second core)

Things need to have improved mightily since then and I've never seen an article saying they had.

We've already gone through a period where vendors were touting a second core when Android couldn't use it at all. I'd really like to see an article showing where the state of the art is now, before we let them pull the same shit again with OMG 8 CORES!!1!

My understanding is that the Dalvik VM itself can use multiple cores in only a limited capacity, but since each app gets its own VM instance, the kernel could schedule two different apps to run on two different cores. More cores doesn't do anything to help an individual app's performance (unless it's using the NDK), but overall improves the responsiveness of the OS.

It honestly doesn't matter how multithreaded Android is, if the Dalvik virtual machine can't take advantage of multiple cores. The vast, vast majority of Android apps are running on Dalvik.

In Android 4, one of the bulleted new features was limited support for a second core. (They called out running garbage collection from the second core)

Things need to have improved mightily since then and I've never seen an article saying they had.

Woha you seem to have extreme misunderstandings here. Yes the runtime itself really only profits from several threads for GC. But that doesn't mean that applications running on Dalvik can't take advantage of several cores if available. If you write "new Thread(foo).start()" (not that you in general should do it like that) in your android application, Dalvik will create a new native thread for you and you'll get all that nice multithreading. Not withstanding underlying OS limitations.

There's no difference to IOS here. Runtime vs. native code only makes it a bit harder to understand for some people I assume.

Barely mentioned Android, didn't give any attention to third party developers, no new features or tools for third party businesses in their ecosystem. And people say Apple are megalomaniacs!

I know this isn't how Samsung usually do it, but I have to wonder how far this cramming of useless features can go. They've used up 5 years of gimmicks in one go; all poorly implemented, disabled by default and never going to be used.

Give attention to one or two new things, get them right, and people will be excited by them. This announcement is like they all crammed really hard in a boardroom meeting to come up with as many little quirks and ~features~ as they possibly could.

Tilt-scrolling is terrible, Instapaper had this years ago on iOS and it's an instant turn-off thing. Speaking of instant turn-off, how annoying is pausing a video if you look away? "Answer a call by swiping your hand over the phone" jesus nobody on earth is going to do this.

People are going to get all tizzy and stack up these ~brilliant features~ against ~boring old iPhone~ but it's all so besides the point.

It's a shame really, because all these things are the logical extension of feature development in smartphones. Some are extremely useful and have the potential to change how you use your phone. But Samsung have crammed them all together, I doubt any are done well, and reduced them all to a list of quirky features like a 1990s Japanese video camera.

Pthreads aren't harder here then anywhere else. The Java-based Dalvik parts are multithread-enabled too of course with a bit of different techniques, like worker threads and asynctasks. Dalvik itselfs spans new threads for every app of course. Could probably be a lot better on the VM-side. But games and so on use Pthreads any way. Most larger apps use the NDK.

It honestly doesn't matter how multithreaded Android is, if the Dalvik virtual machine can't take advantage of multiple cores. The vast, vast majority of Android apps are running on Dalvik.

In Android 4, one of the bulleted new features was limited support for a second core. (They called out running garbage collection from the second core)

Things need to have improved mightily since then and I've never seen an article saying they had.

We've already gone through a period where vendors were touting a second core when Android couldn't use it at all. I'd really like to see an article showing where the state of the art is now, before we let them pull the same shit again with OMG 8 CORES!!1!

My understanding is that the Dalvik VM itself can use multiple cores in only a limited capacity, but since each app gets its own VM instance, the kernel could schedule two different apps to run on two different cores. More cores doesn't do anything to help an individual app's performance (unless it's using the NDK), but overall improves the responsiveness of the OS.

Right? Or am I way off here?

Pretty much right, but you forgot to mention that modern phone apps tend to saturate cores with massive amounts of calculation, such that context switching between multiple threads on a single core is almost impossible. After all, a single core like that is only capable of somewhere around a billion operations per second and clearly you don't have much capacity for sharing a core among multiple threads/processes with numbers like that.

That's why massively multicore SoCs are critical for modern phones, and it's why iPhones with their paltry two cores are way behind the curve.

I'm glad to see the article has been updated, with the correct information on LTE support and scrolling.

However, the article's description still needs to be fixed. It states "Call from global LTE frequencies, scroll with eye-tracking". In actuality, as per the update, the LTE frequencies are limited based on where the phone was purchased, and scrolling cannot be done by eye-tracking.

It honestly doesn't matter how multithreaded Android is, if the Dalvik virtual machine can't take advantage of multiple cores. The vast, vast majority of Android apps are running on Dalvik.

In Android 4, one of the bulleted new features was limited support for a second core. (They called out running garbage collection from the second core)

Things need to have improved mightily since then and I've never seen an article saying they had.

Woha you seem to have extreme misunderstandings here. Yes the runtime itself really only profits from several threads for GC. But that doesn't mean that applications running on Dalvik can't take advantage of several cores if available. If you write "new Thread(foo).start()" (not that you in general should do it like that) in your android application, Dalvik will create a new native thread for you and you'll get all that nice multithreading. Not withstanding underlying OS limitations.

Just because you can create a new thread doesn't mean it will be scheduled on a different core. Maybe it will, but don't think that just because an API allows you to create threads that the platform automatically also supports multiple cores.

No, it's not. Where the hell do people get the idea that the Dalvik VM limits the available cores to 2 per application?

[Here look at the performance data for the Optimus G and linpack. You notice the larger than 2 performance scaling when going from single to multithreaded?

ws3 wrote:

Just because you can create a new thread doesn't mean it will be scheduled on a different core. Maybe it will, but don't think that just because an API allows you to create threads that the platform automatically also supports multiple cores.

Apart from the experimental refute of this claim, that'd be an extremely strange change to the underlying kernel "Oh sure we have 4 cores and this application is requesting them, but let's just ignore it and run at halve the speed".

Why aren't more people talking about the IR blaster feature? That's gonna rock!

How is it gonna rock?

A lot of electronic components can only be remote controlled through infrared based signals from existing remote controls. An IR blaster sends those signals. So think about older televisions, dvd/bluray, stereo, tivo, etc. being controlled by a phone app.

With newer electronics, you accomplish the same thing over wifi or bluetooth, which pretty much all phones have.

However, if you read Anandtech's article, they call it an IR sensor which is used to enable gesture recognition, not an IR blaster that would be used to send remote control signals.

Q2??? Samsung, do you not learn? Giving your competition 4+ months before your launch, a mere 2 or so from their own, you're essentially giving them design goals to trump with more than enough lead time to do just that. Though I don;t see apple slapping an 8 core of their own on the market, I fully expect whatever they release will out benchmark tyour cores at their fastest, and run longer on battery. Half the features here seem like gimmicks, and the rest marketing fluff or specs noone cares about.

802.11AC on a phone? Really? aka a network topology faster than the data storage read/write? useless...

Overhyped, overspecced, all it boils down to is an overpriced 4 core phone (since it can't use all 8 at once) that devs will likely have major issues coding apps for, and it's got a giant target painted on it.

Next time Samsung, keep your specs secrets, and launch your flagship AFTER apple does if its going to be that close anyway. You might fare better, maybe even catch them off their game.

Smart Scroll seems like the ultimate way for a company to optimize content (see: ads) on screens. I wonder how long it will be until Google figures out a way to harvest "eye tracking" as a way to sell premium ad space to advertisers.

It's a neat idea, though. I'm about as far from being an Android fan as a person can get, but Samsung rocks. I hope they bring this kind of tech to WP8.

Barely mentioned Android, didn't give any attention to third party developers, no new features or tools for third party businesses in their ecosystem. And people say Apple are megalomaniacs!

I know this isn't how Samsung usually do it, but I have to wonder how far this cramming of useless features can go. They've used up 5 years of gimmicks in one go; all poorly implemented, disabled by default and never going to be used.

Give attention to one or two new things, get them right, and people will be excited by them. This announcement is like they all crammed really hard in a boardroom meeting to come up with as many little quirks and ~features~ as they possibly could.

Tilt-scrolling is terrible, Instapaper had this years ago on iOS and it's an instant turn-off thing. Speaking of instant turn-off, how annoying is pausing a video if you look away? "Answer a call by swiping your hand over the phone" jesus nobody on earth is going to do this.

People are going to get all tizzy and stack up these ~brilliant features~ against ~boring old iPhone~ but it's all so besides the point.

It's a shame really, because all these things are the logical extension of feature development in smartphones. Some are extremely useful and have the potential to change how you use your phone. But Samsung have crammed them all together, I doubt any are done well, and reduced them all to a list of quirky features like a 1990s Japanese video camera.

Just because you can create a new thread doesn't mean it will be scheduled on a different core. Maybe it will, but don't think that just because an API allows you to create threads that the platform automatically also supports multiple cores.

Apart from the experimental refute of this claim, that'd be an extremely strange change to the underlying kernel "Oh sure we have 4 cores and this application is requesting them, but let's just ignore it and run at halve the speed".

Requesting a new thread is not the same as requesting a core. I don't doubt that Android is capable of scheduling threads across all available cores, but I think you're conflating two different things.

Also, there is no reason to think that multiple threads run "faster" in general when they are scheduled on different cores than if they were scheduled on the same core. Most threads are sleeping or blocking on I/O for 99% of their lifetimes.

Why aren't more people talking about the IR blaster feature? That's gonna rock!

How is it gonna rock?

A lot of electronic components can only be remote controlled through infrared based signals from existing remote controls. An IR blaster sends those signals. So think about older televisions, dvd/bluray, stereo, tivo, etc. being controlled by a phone app.

Ok, well although that might be moderately useful for people who aren't me. I don't see how it "rocks".

Requesting a new thread is not the same as requesting a core. I don't doubt that Android is capable of scheduling threads across all available cores, but I think you're conflating two different things.

Yes I know, but the very easy fact is: Multithreaded linpack has performance scaling > 2 compared to the single threaded version (yes I know superlinear scaling is possible in some situations, but I've never seen a situation where it was as much as seen in the given benchmarks..).

And there's no point throwing unnecessary nitpicky details that have nothing to do with the topic at hand into the discussion. Yes I also know that throwing more cores at a IO bound problem isn't going to make it faster.. (more threads can still help, which is why you can actually get a speedup in cpython using threads..).

BullBearMS wrote:

Voo42 wrote:

[Here look at the performance data for the Optimus G and linpack. You notice the larger than 2 performance scaling when going from single to multithreaded?.

You do know it's possible to write Android applications that ignore the dalvik virtual machine and run directly on linux now, don't you?

Yes and I also know that Anand is using the Dalvik version of linpack.

I must be one of the few who doesn't want a 5" phone in my front pocket. I don't care how thick or thin a phone is, a 5" diagonal will impinge upon my ability to walk up stairs even more than a 4.3" or 4.7" phone. I guess the only people buying androids have big baggy pants on these days because no one wearing clothes that actually fit them can carry these new phones around. It is absolutely absurd. Maybe my girlfriend will be ok carrying around my next phone in her purse.

Note 2 owner here. Fits in my regular jeans just fine. I take stairs every day and no problems to report taking two steps at a time. Maybe your pockets are tiny?

Right with ya.

I'm 5'9, 160, and I can put the Note 2 comfortably in every pocket of every pair of pants and shorts I own - and not many are baggy or anything like that.

I specifically wore the jeans with the smallest pockets the day I went to purchase - to see if it'd fit comfy.

The whole idea of not directly mapping dalvik threads to pthreads is laughable - green threads were given up by Java VMs around the last millenium for very good reasons. And as soon as you map every thread to a native pthread there's no difference between dalvik/native code (as long as the dalvik interpreter doesn't use any global data structures, which - since nobody argues it doesn't allow 2 threads - it obviously doesn't)

Edit: Beaten by arhra who even has a authorative source on the topic, nice.

ws3 wrote:

Voo42 wrote:

Yes I also know that throwing more cores at a IO bound problem isn't going to make it faster.

What phone app isn't I/O bound?Except for maybe a very high-end game?

Did we now stop arguing whether dalvik threads can be scheduled on more than 2 cores and argue about whether that's especially useful? In that case I fear we agree: For my use case I doubt I ever profit from the 4 cores in my nexus 4 at all.

FunkTron wrote:

Right with ya.

I'm 5'9, 160, and I can put the Note 2 comfortably in every pocket of every pair of pants and shorts I own - and not many are baggy or anything like that.

I specifically wore the jeans with the smallest pockets the day I went to purchase - to see if it'd fit comfy.

It does.

I'm 6"3 and while I can easily fit the nexus 4 into my pockets (can't talk about anything else), personally I would prefer a smaller phone since it's just that tiny bit too large for my hands when using it single handed. Different preferences, I'd just like to *have* the option of a smaller, high-end android phone.

I must be one of the few who doesn't want a 5" phone in my front pocket. I don't care how thick or thin a phone is, a 5" diagonal will impinge upon my ability to walk up stairs even more than a 4.3" or 4.7" phone. I guess the only people buying androids have big baggy pants on these days because no one wearing clothes that actually fit them can carry these new phones around. It is absolutely absurd. Maybe my girlfriend will be ok carrying around my next phone in her purse.

Note 2 owner here. Fits in my regular jeans just fine. I take stairs every day and no problems to report taking two steps at a time. Maybe your pockets are tiny?

Right with ya.

I'm 5'9, 160, and I can put the Note 2 comfortably in every pocket of every pair of pants and shorts I own - and not many are baggy or anything like that.

I specifically wore the jeans with the smallest pockets the day I went to purchase - to see if it'd fit comfy.

It does.

Is it in a case? I have a Galaxy Nexus (*slightly* smaller than the S3) and with a flip-cover case on it it's uncomfortable in a front pocket when I sit down. I have to remove it. I'd like to carry it outside of a case, but one small drop would be all that's needed to knacker it and I've not owned it long enough to be taking those kinds of risks yet.

I don't get it. What is the big deal? If battery technology is still where it is, why add more cores? There must still be some type of energy cost involved to manage eight cores, but I guess the more efficient ones make up for that. So you get a slower phone most of the time, but at what point does the phone know it is too low on battery to deny switching to faster cores? As far as ergonomics are concerned, how many women's hands can span the bigger screen without resorting to using both hands? Will that cost them sales because it won't fit in a compact, $300 clutch. This may seem a lot more relevant when you realize that women are becoming the big-time bread winners in our world, and the budget controllers at home.

I must be one of the few who doesn't want a 5" phone in my front pocket. I don't care how thick or thin a phone is, a 5" diagonal will impinge upon my ability to walk up stairs even more than a 4.3" or 4.7" phone. I guess the only people buying androids have big baggy pants on these days because no one wearing clothes that actually fit them can carry these new phones around. It is absolutely absurd. Maybe my girlfriend will be ok carrying around my next phone in her purse.

Note 2 owner here. Fits in my regular jeans just fine. I take stairs every day and no problems to report taking two steps at a time. Maybe your pockets are tiny?

To be fair, the pockets in my favorite pair of jeans have gotten tighter as time has gone on.

I must be one of the few who doesn't want a 5" phone in my front pocket. I don't care how thick or thin a phone is, a 5" diagonal will impinge upon my ability to walk up stairs even more than a 4.3" or 4.7" phone. I guess the only people buying androids have big baggy pants on these days because no one wearing clothes that actually fit them can carry these new phones around. It is absolutely absurd. Maybe my girlfriend will be ok carrying around my next phone in her purse.

Note 2 owner here. Fits in my regular jeans just fine. I take stairs every day and no problems to report taking two steps at a time. Maybe your pockets are tiny?

Right with ya.

I'm 5'9, 160, and I can put the Note 2 comfortably in every pocket of every pair of pants and shorts I own - and not many are baggy or anything like that.

I specifically wore the jeans with the smallest pockets the day I went to purchase - to see if it'd fit comfy.

It does.

Is it in a case? I have a Galaxy Nexus (*slightly* smaller than the S3) and with a flip-cover case on it it's uncomfortable in a front pocket when I sit down. I have to remove it. I'd like to carry it outside of a case, but one small drop would be all that's needed to knacker it and I've not owned it long enough to be taking those kinds of risks yet.

The flip cover or a bumper case - but not a bigger case with kickstands and such. It still fits with all, but does become uncomfortable. This is that one pair of pants, though - most of my other pants have larger pockets and wouldn't be an issue at all.

I was very happily surprised by this development, as I thought I'd be carrying the phone in hand more than I want to - but it's no different from how I carry any other phone.

Also nice is that I can operate it one-handed. The plastic is not too slick (unless hands are wet), and I can hold it in such a way that I can get to all parts of the screen with my thumb.

We've already gone through a period where vendors were touting a second core when Android couldn't use it at all. I'd really like to see an article showing where the state of the art is now, before we let them pull the same shit again with OMG 8 CORES!!1!

Isn't one of the reasons Android chose support two cores now is the availability of two core to phones to support?

My guess is if Samsung is as successful in selling these phones as they were with their previous phones, you'll see multi-core support show up in Android sooner, rather than later.

Florence Ion / Florence was a former Reviews Editor at Ars, with a focus on Android, gadgets, and essential gear. She received a degree in journalism from San Francisco State University and lives in the Bay Area.